paradise regained

This weekend, for Valentine's day, in the spirit of love and beauty, I at last caved to Anthro's latest round of markdowns and bought myself Tim Walker's Pictures book. The cover is a Vogue shoot of a pin-up model wearing bunny ears, sitting on a pile of chairs, surrounded by white (live) bunnies. It seems glam, glossy, and contemporary. However the cover underneath the book jacket, embossed with silver ink on blue, reveals a more intimate view of the heart of his work. Its letters are hand-drawn, its border covered in drawings of fairytale ships, roses, beds hanging from branches, umbrellas, a goodnight moon. For Tim Walker, despite his impeccable sense for fashion, style, and brilliant success with the world's forefront fashion magazine, is, at heart, one who infuses dreams, fashion, reality, and nostalgic English countrysides filled with brown bunnies, ponies, and chickens.

From his forward, "daydreaming":

"When I think about it, photographs, to me are really a kind of dream state. It's not about a good dream, or a bad dream...its more important that your day hazes and your mind drifts towards only being concerned by your imaginings....and, as you tour your imagination you want to photograph what you are seeing...BUT...the only way you can do this is by BELIEF...really utterly absolutely passionately firmly believing...you see, you are SO very keen to show what you've seen that somehow it becomes true, and the picture you end up taking becomes a souvenir, a piece of proof brought back all the way from the daydream. "
-Tim Walker, London 2008

Perhaps I love these because lately I have been having vivid, crazy, sometimes-like-movie-stills dreams. Perhaps it is because I grew up making fairy houses out of leaves in my backyard. Or because there are still some of us who cannot keep going foward into modernity without taking a good look at how things used to be. How things could be. It is a bit idealistic and unrealistic to live in the clouds of our imaginings everyday, but it is far more creative than turning on the tv, for it demands us to be the agents of change not just the watchers. Tim Walker works primarily for Italian and British Vogue, and has been recreating British identity through his photographs. I wish he would do the same for America, too, sometimes. Because it's true, we can only cling to what is true by belief, and belief is what allows what is true to become real to us.